(Chart from Kalamazoo LISC point in time survey)
Five years ago several groups in the Kalamazoo area began work on a ten year plan to end homelessness. In the first of a three part series, WMUK’s Gordon Evans looks at some of the progress made to date:
Anthony Lamont Turner: I was working and partying. I made bad choices, ended up in jail, and I became homeless
Lauren Potter: Hard times basically. Probably your hardest times would be the cold and rain. Like just before it drops below freezing.
Lizark Fisher: I moved from Missouri to here. And I’ve been off and on staying over women’s houses, trying to be in a relationship and when that falls part I go back to the homelessness.
Anthony Lamont Turner, Loren Potter and Lizark Fisher all have different stories of how they ended up homeless. But all three have spent years sleeping in shelters and sometimes outdoors. Five years ago, the Affordable Housing Partnership was launched in Kalamazoo County in an attempt to reduce and maybe eliminate homelessness. David Artley is the Director of Kalamazoo County’s Office of Resource Development. He has also been the volunteer staff member for the county’s public housing commission and is coordinator of the Local Housing Assistance Fund:
(David Artley: “through December of last year we had put out 117 vouchers, touching men, women, children”
The vouchers help pay for housing for eligible families that apply for the assistance. Eligibility is determined by income and housing situation. Artley says Housing Resources Incorporated was contracted with the Housing Assistance Fund for programs which aim to keep people from becoming homeless:
(David Artley: “And ours was directed outside of the city of Kalamazoo, and we reached out and touched 134 families and through December of last year 89% of those families were still in housing, so they never went homeless”)
Artley says 44 of the families who have received housing vouchers have in his words “graduated” to a more stable situation:
(David Artley “I’ve enjoyed the experience, I think we’re making a difference. Someone might say ‘wow, 44% success rate on vouchers, that’s not very big. Well there’s this program in Saint Louis that has 80%’ Who do they serve?”)
Artley says the Kalamazoo program serves people on the lower end of the income scale, at 30% of Area Median Income. That’s $18,700 dollars a year for a family of four. Artley says programs in other cities don’t have such stringent income requirements. The Local Initiative Support Corporation of Kalamazoo, or LISC, conducts an annual count of the homeless population in Kalamazoo County. The most recent one in January of this year shows fewer people were homeless than in January of 2007. But the decline has not been steady and there was an increase in the number of homeless over the last year. Michelle Fare former program officer for the Kalamazoo office of LISC says the economy has been a complicating factor in reducing homelessness. But Fare, who left LISC in the fall, says that doesn’t mean there hasn’t been progress:
(Michelle Fare: “You know we haven’t seen major spikes in the number of folks that are homeless. We’ve seen it kind of stay level with a few dips here and there. So we are seeing progress towards ending homelessness. And I think if we didn’t have plan and the partners in place, working on these efforts, then we just would have seen these numbers skyrocket”)
Housing Resources Incorporated Executive Director Ellen Kissinger-Rothi says $1.1-million in federal stimulus funds that came to Kalamazoo were used to help keep people in housing and to help get people out of shelters:
(Ellen Kissinger-Rothi: “So the good news is we didn’t have to create more emergency shelter beds in the middle of this recession. Instead, we created more permanent affordable housing by exiting people into generally market rate housing in our community, and/or keeping them in their current housing, which is a whole other way of dealing with homelessness”)
Kissinger-Rothi says that allowed people to get back into a normal lifestyle. She says many of them were able to continue working and keep their children in school. Kalamazoo County Housing Commission Chairman David Anderson says there has been a shift in the focus in addressing homelessness. He says now there’s more effort put into keeping people in their homes, and moving them quickly from shelters into more permanent housing. In the past Anderson says homelessness was simply managed:
(David Anderson “Whether we have been successful in now accomplishing that is in question. But the idea that we want to approach homelessness differently, from the idea of ‘we’ll just create more shelters and fill them up.’ I think that is definitely a sign of progress”)
Anderson says a plan to end homelessness in ten years is an ambitious goal. But he says changing the approach is an important step for the remainder of the ten year plan and beyond.
In part two: a look at the obstablces to escaping homelessness.
